


Lyrium and Poison

by Whuffie



Category: Dragon Age: Origins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-30
Updated: 2017-01-30
Packaged: 2018-09-20 21:29:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9516974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whuffie/pseuds/Whuffie
Summary: In the time between Uldred's revolt and rescue by Warden Mage Audrie, Cullen was left to torment and torture. This is a very dark and uncomfortable story. If you read it, be aware of this. I wrote it a long time ago before Inquisition came out because I was writing Cullen from DA2. I wanted to get into his head space and frame exactly what happened to him so I'd know for whatever I wrote in future. It's always been part of how I write Cullen and fits with his updated DA:I canon. For those who want to know what he'll be overcoming in future with a relationship between himself and Audrie - here it is.This isn't incredibly graphic but the subject matter is questionable for some readers. Don't read if you think it will bother you.Warnings: Torture (physical and mental.) Implied sexual assault. Rape mentions. Attempted rape.Proceed with caution.





	

Cullen hung by his wrists, hands locked over his head and feet suspended without touching the floor. His arms had long since begun to crush the air out of his lungs, and he struggled feebly against iron cuffs cutting as sharp as ground glass into his wrists. Trickles of blood twined down along his arms, mingling with crusts from older wounds. Dried blood flaked off when he moved, and links of dangling, cold chain brushed against his skin. How much of it was real? His pained groan made lips vibrate and caused his pain to pulse against the back of his eyes. It was the steady, stubborn throb which matched his heart, reminding him that he was still alive. Hazily wondering how much time had passed, he rolled his chin to brush against his shoulder, feeling how far his beard had grown. It had to be at least a week, and the need for lyrium was wrenching through his veins like burning poison. They’d been careful about keeping him coherent, although barely, because they wanted him both conscious and aware. If he couldn’t watch, it was impossible for him to suffer, and Uldred didn’t allow the luxury of anything blunting soul wrenching agony. Oh Maker… the things they’d made him watch, and tears threatened in the corners of his eyes from the lyrium denial. Tilting his chin back, he swallowed against a parched throat, but although the muscles worked convulsively, there wasn’t enough spit in his mouth to give any relief. He resisted the urge to scream and shake his shackles. _I will stay strong_ , he swore silently, and repeated familiar cants of the Chant of Light. They wrapped him up in consolation as well as helping fortify his mental shield.

“No… no more,” Leorah croaked next to him and broke his concentration. “Anything… please just no more.”

“Don’t give in,” Cullen coughed in the Stygian air, barely recognizing his own voice. He swung his chin clumsily in the direction of the elven mage who had been in charge of the stockroom. He’d known her since he'd been stationed at Kinloch Hold, and Cullen was glad they couldn’t see each other’s bruised, battered bodies. The cold, black tomb they’d been locked away in was once used for solitary confinement for punishing mages like Anders who continually ran from the Circle. Uldred had taken a gruesome fancy to the idea of using it as a place to torture them. “Stay strong,” he rasped with as much vigor as he could force into the words, pushing them out of his chest. “You know you can’t give in,” he tried to swallow again against the raw meat which had been his throat, “not to the demons!”

“I… it’s too much…” Leorah sounded as pale as a battered cloth torn apart in a storm. Her voice was as shattered and beaten as her body. “You don’t know what they’ve been doing to me, Cullen,” she whimpered and tears began to fill her voice. Her body was leaking water which it no longer had to spare. “You were supposed to protect us from this. We trusted the templars.” She wept openly with tiny, feeble sobs in the darkness as her own chains rattled. “You should have protected us…”

Cullen knew some of what they’d done to her, and he sucked in his breath. He held it, as if that would keep the memory of her screams at bay. They’d made those who resisted them watch everything, throwing buckets of iced water in their faces if they tried to fall unconscious or look away. Some of the men involved were templars under the thrall of demons, which had made it worse. It had violated them just as badly as it had her, and the Abominations laughed the entire time, holding her down. _Maker, oh Maker, forgive me._ Her words cut through him worse than any torture they could have devised. They’d even promised to make it all stop if Cullen and the others would give in. One of the mages had, wanting to do anything to spare Leorah suffering, then after he turned, he began to take part. It was a templar’s duty to protect her, and he’d failed in it just as much as he had miserably fallen short of his vow to keep people safe from blood mages. All of it was from magic. “Stay strong,” he intoned as much to himself as to her.

“I… can’t,” she sniffled in a tiny, broken voice. “I’m sorry… I just can’t. Not any more.”

“Leorah!” The yell lost most of its potency through cracked lips and he ineffectively threw weight against his chains. He felt the nauseating wave of heat and palatable evil brush against his skin, crawling over it like slithering worms. He didn’t see the change, and he thanked the Maker for the small favor as his head hung so limp that his chin hit his collarbone. Closing his eyes against the flare of unholy light which encompassed the senior enchanter’s body, he didn’t want to watch it again. He’d seen it happen to Torrin, Sweeny, and others already who weren’t butchered by rampaging abominations in the halls as blood sacrifices. His tears had dried into a crumbly film beneath his lashes as he squeezed his eyes shut, but the light couldn’t be obliterated out from the other side of his lids. Sickening sounds of warping bone and melting flesh accompanied Leorah’s last, elven scream. Being a mage, she could be seduced or battered into submission by the Blood Mages so a demon could take her body, and he prayed that she would kill him once it had seized control of her.

He waited, counting the times his heart thumped against his ribs, praying the Maker heard his plea. Chains rattled with renewed, inhuman vigor as the thing gutturally laughed in a low, mocking, sinister sound which chilled Cullen’s spine. “Free,” it rasped, “to taste the mortal world.”

  
It didn’t kill him, and torchlight flooded the chamber as staffs thumped with mock authority on the floor. The door were thrown open with aplomb, starkly silhouetting a group of robbed figures in the splash of orange. The one who stood most arrogantly at the front had a gleam reflecting greasily over the skin of his bald head. “Well,” Uldred sneered nasally through his aquiline nose from the hallway. Casually, he peered inside, and his eyes glittered with satisfaction at the thing which had been Leorah rattled its chains. “Let our newly liberated friend out, by all means.” He negligently ordered the others with a flip of his hand.

Cullen squinted at him through the dim light as it jabbed into his eyes. He watched with angry, dismal fatality as the new Abomination was released from its bonds. The thing rubbed its wrists with a dry cackle of tearing flesh the lurched casually outside into the freedom of a hallway.

“What of you, Boy?” Uldred asked solicitously as if he were inquiring if they would be serving stew or roast chicken for the evening meal. “Are you ready to finally take what we offer? We can make all the pain go away, you know, and give you everything you have ever dreamed or longed for.”

Cullen jerked spasmodically in his chains, although his arms had long since gone numb. “Magic exists,” he snapped piously with fire burning in his breast, “to serve man, and never to rule over him! Foul and corrupt are they who have taken his gift and turned it against his children!”

  
“The Maker.” Uldred threw back his head and laughed with contemptuous delight, savoring the foolish templar’s attempt at protecting himself with faded, pointless words belonging to a dead and forgotten deity. “You actually call on your pitiful little Chant of Light. Where is your precious Maker now, Boy? I think he’s abandoned you to me. I must remember to thank him for that.” He tugged at his sleeve cuff, and his eyes drifted to a bored expression. “I suppose you need more time to think about things. It’s getting close to time for you to need lyrium I think, isn’t it? Perhaps a little food and water, too. We can’t have you fainting away or dying on us, now can we?”

Jerking his head high, Cullen called out in righteous fury, “I shall not be left to wander the drifting roads of the Fade.” Drawing strength from it, he flung it up against Uldred’s mocking taunts. “For there is no darkness, nor death either, in the Maker’s Light!”

  
“So predictable,” the Abomination sighed, and negligently tossed a parallelization spell over the templar so that he could be unbound. “Take him down for awhile. There are other uses for him now.” There were always mages who resented the templars, even without being gifted with the forbidden arts. It took little, if any, convincing to have them delight in a helpless, weakened templar who was at their mercy.  
   
One of the women slid a heavy iron key into Cullen's manacle, leaning closer than she needed to and deliberately violating his personal space. Sharyn’s eyes raked over his nearly naked body and she pretended to twirl the end of her hair with her free hand. Doing a mocking flounce in place, she spun around like a giddy school girl, pressing her mouth into a pout. “What’s wrong, Cullen? Aren’t I good enough for you?” Her lips curled into a cruel smile which was mostly bared teeth. “We’ll see,” she taunted in a pert sing-song. She backed away and the door enclosed Cullen into darkness again.

They moved him to a new cell and began forcing him awake every hour or half hour, never allowing unconsciousness or sleep to take over his body. Between that and the lack of lyrium, he had begun to see things which weren’t there, and family members who were dead appeared in front of him. Some offered him false hope or comfort while others only drove vindictive barbs into his already wounded soul.

Once he was in a new cage, he was subjected to the sight of his friends being tortured to death, and systematically broken. He was hemmed in with charred, rotting bodies of templars who he’d known the largest part of his life. One had shared a room with Cullen since training, but the bodies were left with him as a silent reminder of his own frail mortality, and that his time would come. Running his fingertips lightly over Kenley’s face, he closed his best friend’s eyes, saying a brief prayer over all of them as he committed their souls to the Maker.

  
His captors allowed Cullen to sleep once he’d been confined again. His new imprisonment had no bars, but it kept him locked away as securely behind slick, humming walls which vibrated with magic and stank of blood. Lyrium withdrawl began to rip at him, sinking its fingers into his clammy flesh and making it crawl with the feeling of burrowing beetles in his veins. Collapsed on his side as far away from the decomposing bodies and the door to the Harrowing chamber as he could get, his body forced exhausted, shivering sleep onto him.

“Cullen?” He recognized the voice and cracked his eyes open, throwing himself into a sitting position and scrambling backward, knowing it would only be a trick. His heels didn’t scrape against cold stone, nor did his back press up against either the invisible force of his cage or armor of his rotting companions. Looking down at himself in amazement, and his skin was completely unblemished by dirt or any of his recent torture. He was in his small clothes, but they were as clean as the bedsheets to his quarters. “You were having a terrible dream,”  told him as she reached toward him and caressed his face, drawing his head down to cradle against her breasts. She was dressed in the rest of his sheet and nothing else, but they were both safely locked in his room. “It’s all over my love.” Audrie told him in a voice he’d longed to hear her use for a long, painful year. It brimmed with joy, desire, and promise that she belonged to him and no one else. “Just bad dreams.”

  
“They seemed so real.” His stutter had been lost somewhere, and he put his arms around her waist, nestling his neatly trimmed and shaven cheek into her lap as he hugged her. Maker, she was so wonderful. Her curves were perfect and luscious as he’d always imagined her to be, and she smelled just as she always had, filling him with a sense of home. 

“Dreams always do,” she acknowledged seriously as she stroked his short hair, her warm fingers going all the way to the scalp. Letting the sheet pool around her hips, she sat astride his thighs. “You need your lyrium. It’s making your nightmares worse.” She took a shimmering vial from the bedside and popped the cork from it. Turning it over to dampen her finger with it, she ran the tip along his lip seductively, letting his tongue dart our and catch it, then draw her finger between his lips, gently sucking on it. She laughed softly as her eyes burned into his with lust, and the tip of her tongue dampened her lips. Her pale hair shimmered around creamy shoulders as she leaned over him, kissing him with deep promise and passion. Her fingers entwined with his, placing his hands on places he’d wanted to touch for a long time, but propriety forbade it. Templars and mages could be friends, but never lovers. The old law which had balked them for so long had fallen apart somewhere with his dreams, no longer holding any power over them. Her lips were sweet and eager as her breath was turning quicker with the mingling promise of forthcoming sex. Her fingernail tickled along the line of soft hair on his chest, winding down toward his navel.

… it was cold?

Something didn’t feel right and he blinked, trying to focus his muzzy mind as he called her by name. “Audrie?” As he stared, he wondered how he could miss the fact it wasn’t her fingernail which he felt, but the tip of a knife which was making a slow, sickly seductive circle around one of his hardening nipples.

It wasn’t right …

She placed a warm, scintillating kiss in the center of his chest, then another below it, working her way down the length of his body. Her hair had faded from the familiar, mussed blond disarray he’d found so charming on the night of her Harrowing into muddy brown, straight, and short. She was wearing a robe, then it was Audrie, naked and…

“ _No!_ ” he screamed, putting his hands flat against her stomach and shoving with all of his emaciated strength. His body, to his disgust, had completely reacted to what he’d thought was real. The fallacy of his quarters shifted in front of his eyes, blurring to the reality of the cage then back to the dream manufactured in his mind. Digging his heels against the stone floor, he crawled away from Sharyn until he fell weakly onto one elbow, sprawling out on one side. His face slumped inches from the stone and he coughed so violently his ribs stood in stark relief against his pale, dirty skin. Had he been able to retch, he would have done so, but as his body wouldn’t give up even bile. He began to pray as his raw fingertips curled against the rough stone into fists. “Let the blade pass through the flesh. Let my blood touch the ground. Let my cries touch their hearts. Let mine be the last sacrifice.” The words of the Chant reverberated against his lips as they ricocheted. “Blessed are the righteous, the lights in the shadow. In their blood the Maker’s will is written.”

“Is that the best you can do?” Sharyn cooed in a voice made of honey and plague flesh. “Cullen. I still have what you need, sweet boy,” she taunted as she held the vial of lyrium up beside her face and tilted it too and fro, letting the low light catch the sapphire color next to her vicious grin. “Why don’t you come and get it? We could have so much fun together, you and I.” She put the stopper on the vial as he raised his head just enough for him to see. Laughing like silk over skin, she dropped it into her cleavage. Pushing her lower lip out into a little girl pout, she leaned forward. “Come and get it. You know you need it.”

“I will stay strong,” he swore to her thickly, and deliberately forced his muscles to obey his will. Although they were screaming protest to fold so he could lay down, curling in a fetal position, he mastered his body. “Blessed are they,” he began to say in the familiar chant as he forced himself onto his knees, “who stand before the corrupt.” He clasped his hands together and bowed his head before the Maker, “and the wicked. And do not falter!” He squeezed his eyes shut and yelled the last line through a rattling, dry throat, throwing faith, challenge, and a copious amount of willpower into resisting her advances. It wasn’t her body he had desperate need of, but the lyrium.

“Suit yourself, Boy,” the Blood Mage hissed, and threw herself upright. Lording over him, she slapped him hard across the face, opening his partially healed split lip with the loud crack of flesh meeting flesh. “Keep your precious Maker, but I can assure you that you will eventually break. Know me, Boy,” her voice deepened as the infernal thing which was feeding from what remained of the mage rose up to lash at him directly. The woman’s eyes flared into an unholy red glow which wound its way as tendrils through her face like spiderwebs, then spewed out of her mouth. “Look upon me and know me well, for I am Misery!”

“There is but one Truth,” he used the words as the only weapon which he had left. “All things are known to our Maker. And he shall judge their lies.” Folding his arms in front of him again, he clasped his fingers together so hard the joints popped, but it kept them from shaking. She slapped him harder, trying to force him to look at her face, but each time he resisted. It wasn’t until his face became a raw pulp and they had to paralyze him to place a healing poultice on it that she stopped. He refused to give her the satisfaction of looking into the face of the infernal, even when her talon nails dug into his jaw and tried to force him to look at her.

During the long blur of time which followed, the hope of rescue from Greagoir died. Hard muscle in his chest and belly had bowed close to his bones from long term hunger. Uldred continued to ration out his food, water and lyrium levels to barely keep him alive. They wanted to be sure he was fully coherent when they tempted him with the images they dug out of his brain and darkest fantasies. Misery, as the creature called itself, often tried to convince him that he saw Audrie standing on the other side of the cage barrier, offering him freedom. Other times they tried again to convince him that he was somewhere else, from his childhood home in Honnleath, Audrie's bed or his. He’d stopped believing anything they showed him, but like the wind and snow could destroy a mountain with time, his will was being eroded day by day and week by week. Rocking in position, he prayed, sometime silently, other times aloud for the comfort of his own voice to try and remind himself he was sane. The wall of his will was cracking and he would have killed himself had he the means to do it after he saw First Enchanter Irving and other survivors dragged past his cell into the Harrowing Chamber. As Uldred was happy to gloat, without Greagoir and Irving, the Circle belonged to him. It would only be a matter of time, and Irving would be liberated from the cumbersome burden of free will.

**Author's Note:**

> This was written during a really bleak time in my life. My best friend was battling cancer and it was a strange way of letting out some of my own dark, angry, painful feelings. My friend recovered after the original draft, but I lost her forever about a year later. She fought a good fight, but she eventually lost to the cancer. I wanted to mention this because this isn't the kind of thing I write very often or something I particularly enjoy. The pain in it is real, though, because part of it is my own in a very different way. I think that's why this has stuck with me for so many years and why it's still got some "punch." As for Deb, all I can say is you're really missed. Dragon Age will always be missing a little something for me now that you're gone.


End file.
